Vote Favors Senior Housing

VENICE, FL - Senior housing can be built before subsidized family homes at the former Grove Terrace low-income development, the Venice Housing Authority has decided. The agency's decision, in a unanimous vote Thursday, allows potential co-developers Primerica of Tampa and Norstar Development of Buffalo, N.Y., to make a May 26 deadline to apply for 9 percent federal tax credits for the project.

But hesitant VHA board members said they feared family housing will not be built later as planned. The housing authority was burned before by a developer who quit rather than build less profitable family housing, which is why it is back in negotiations with potential developers.

The competing prospective redevelopment firms "pushed for senior housing first because that's the easy part," said Joe Dalton, housing authority vice chairman. "I don't think multifamily will happen if senior housing happens first."

Board member Gloria Felcyn said, "Our job is not to provide senior units."

The housing authority is working to replace 50 low-income residences with a mix of senior, market-rate and public housing on six acres of prime land between the U.S. 41 bypass and the Intracoastal Waterway.

The developers must first demolish 50 public housing units before replacing the multifamily residences. The senior housing portion of the project requires no demolition.

Paula McDonald Rhodes, executive vice president for Primerica, assured her company's commitment to finishing the entire project, not just the senior units.

"As far as cutting and running after the first phase, we're going to be moving on the site plans," Rhodes said. "We have to engineer the whole site. So we'll be very invested in the second phase."

Allowing the senior housing to be built first was primarily a financial consideration, said Ben Bell, a consultant assigned to the project by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Federal and investor funding is more readily available for senior units than for subsidized housing, he said. "Let's be brutally honest," Bell said. If family housing is constructed first, "it's going to take a while." Federal funding law prevents the project from being built all at once.

VHA chairman George Barr said it would be 2010 before work on the project could begin if family housing was done first. Grove Terrace was also tentatively renamed Venetian Manor at the meeting. The next board meeting is April 16 at 6 p.m.